Back in the early 1940s my grandfather had a great idea. Noting the obsession Californians have with perfectly green front lawns, he decided that what they needed was an automatic sprinkler system. He lavished time and love on it, inventing this and fine-tuning that, and eventually came up with what was essentially an electric clock that could be timed to turn water valves on or off at given times of the day and night. Patent number 2311108 was duly filed in 1943, at which point my grandfather started knocking on manufacturers' doors. It was a long, arduous process. Finally, in 1950, after endless discussions, the Moody Rainmaster hit the stores. It earned my grandfather a modest income.

Recently, I decided to follow in his footsteps, but apply a little 21st-century know-how to the mix. Online I found a few like-minded souls interested in producing an improved water sprinkler. We used open-source software to help us create a sprinkler system not only capable of being operated remotely via an app by worried gardeners on holiday, but also sophisticated enough to factor in the latest local weather forecasts before deciding whether to switch the system on or off. We then sent our designs to an assembly house who duly came up with a smart-looking finished product. It has proved quite popular. It took my grandfather a decade and a small fortune to perfect his device and market it. It took us a few months and $5,000.

And that in a nutshell is the Maker movement – harnessing the internet and the latest manufacturing technologies to make things. The past 10 years have been about discovering new ways to work together and offer services on the web. The next 10 years will, I believe, be about applying those lessons to the real world. It means that the future doesn't just belong to internet businesses founded on virtual principles. but to ones that are firmly rooted in the physical world.

This has massive implications not just for would-be entrepreneurs but for national economies. The fact is that any country, if it wants to remain strong, must have a manufacturing base. Even today, about a quarter of the US economy rests on the creation of physical goods. A service economy is all well and good, but eliminate manufacturing and you're a nation of bankers, burger flippers and tour guides. As for software and information industries, they may get all the press, but they employ just a small percentage of the population.

The nascent Maker movement offers a path to reboot manufacturing – not by returning to the giant factories of old, with their armies of employees, but by creating a new kind of manufacturing economy, one shaped more like the web itself: bottom-up, broadly distributed, and highly entrepreneurial. The image of a few smart people changing the world with little more than an internet connection and an idea increasingly describes manufacturing of the future, too.

It's almost a cliche that anyone with a sufficiently good software idea can create a fabulously successful company on the web. That's because there are practically no barriers preventing entry to entrepreneurship online: if you've got a laptop and a credit card, you're in business. Manufacturing has traditionally been regarded as something else entirely. But over the past few years, something remarkable has begun to happen. The process of making physical stuff has started to look more like the process of making digital stuff.

Various innovations are helping to make this possible. The first, of course, is the crowdsourcing power of the internet – if you don't know all the answers, there is someone out there who will. Put out a call for help on a blog or online forum, and somewhere there will be an expert prepared to help you. The second innovation is the increasing sophistication of design programs that can take raw ideas and transform them into executable files. Just as word-processing software has become ever simpler and more intuitive for the user, so Cad (computer-aided design) programs are becoming simultaneously more sophisticated and easier to handle. You design something; the Cad program works out how it can be produced.

And then there is the first generation of 3D printers. These take "geometries" on screen (3D objects that are created with the same sorts of tools that Hollywood uses to make computer generated movies and turn them into objects that you can pick up and use. Some 3D printers extrude molten plastic in layers to make these objects, while others use a laser to harden layers of liquid or powder resin so the product emerges from a bath of the raw material. Yet others can make objects out of any material from glass, steel and bronze to gold, titanium or even cake frosting. You can print a flute or you can print a meal. You can even print human organs of living cells, by squirting a fluid with suspended stem sells on to a support matrix.

What's important here is not so much current reality as potential. 3D printers, laser cutters and "CNC" (computer numerical control) machines, which use a drill bit to shape a block of material, are already sophisticated devices – a few years ago they would have seemed distinctly sci-fi – but I suspect that they resemble the technology of 10 years hence in much the same way that the primitive single-colour dot matrix printers of the 1980s resemble the colour laser printers we having sitting in our homes today. Even now scientists are talking about creating manufacturing tools that use "structural DNA" to create physical objects. In other words, the technology still has a long journey to make. However, its liberating implications are already there, and I believe that when they are combined with other online innovations, a very powerful manufacturing force is created.

First of all, such technology helps remove the shackles from innovation. Until now, the creative process has been beset with obstacles, from the problems inherent in creating a prototype, to the difficulties of persuading a third party to become involved, to the expense of the final launch. And, of course, there's no guarantee of ultimate success.

Now, however, things are looking rather different, both at the innovation and the selling stages.

Take Alex Andon, for example. After graduating in 2006, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for a biotech job. But his real passion was jellyfish, which he had first encountered while sailing in the British Virgin Islands as a teenager. He quit his job and set up a company in a friend's garage to make custom jellyfish tanks with special pumps (a conventional pump will suck in a jellyfish and rip it to pieces), custom water-flow systems to keep the jellyfish off the sides and colourful LED lighting. That in itself was no small feat.

Alex Andon's jellyfish tank.

Where Alex also scored, though, was in his ability to test the market before he launched his product. He opted to go via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to see whether people were interested in what he could offer them. If they were, he invited them to help fund his start-up in return for one of his Desktop Jellyfish Tanks at a discount. His aim was to raise $3,000. After a month he had raised more than $130,000. He had managed both to market-test his idea and find his first customers without having to go to the risky expense of first filling a warehouse (or his bedroom) with jellyfish tanks.

It's not difficult to see how Maker technology suits this sort of niche enterprise. The chances are that a savvy and committed market already exists for the right product, and, thanks to the internet, it's relatively easy to find it. What's more the current manufacturing technology that supports Makers is ideally suited to small batches of bespoke products – from customised plastic toys to tailored clothes. With a conventional factory, you fix on a design and mass-produce it; start up is expensive, but mass-production involves compensating economies of scale. With a 3D printer, start up is cheap, but there are no economies of scale to be gained: product number 150 will cost you precisely the same to create as product number 1. That precludes success in the mass market, but does set you up to succeed in a niche market that by its very nature is less price sensitive.

Moreover, you can, if you choose, make every item bespoke: number 150 does not have to be precisely the same in appearance as number 100. And you can manufacture at home, perhaps using your own 3D printer (in the US prices are already dropping to $1,000) or sending your files to a third party fitted out with the necessary kit.

Having said that, I don't believe that Makers enterprises have to remain small-scale. Many, of course, will opt to do so, creating customised goods for a specialist market. Others, though, can utilise all that the Maker technology has to offer to get an enterprise off the ground, road test its products, respond to customer feedback, and then build a larger-scale company. What they'll have going for them in addition – and it's something that many larger companies lack – is agility and flexibility built into their DNA.

Imagine a new company, WindCo, making its first product: a small backyard wind turbine generator. They make the first prototype themselves, as well as a handful of others. Then, it's time to go into serious production. WindCo is small, and they don't have sufficient manufacturing capacity themselves, so they outsource to a factory in China that can handle small batches cheaply.

If the product is successful and demand builds, they may well opt to move production back home to cut out delays. If it's astonishingly successful, then they may decide to move production to a different factory in China that specialises in bulk manufacturing. They have to be flexible because their business is constantly evolving. They are able to be flexible because their design files are digital, the tooling costs of setting up a new manufacturing operation are minimal, and they all use the same robotic machinery.

This adaptive business of the future will need to be accommodating in other ways, too. It needs to be in constant contact with its customers and be prepared to respond quickly to their feedback and criticism. It needs to be able to draw on skills wherever they are, not merely on people who happen to be close to home. The co-founder of a small robot aeroplane enterprise I run, for example, is not someone who answered an ad, but an enthusiast who came to my attention when he started posting inspired ideas for improvements on a online forum I was hosting.

That this can work is demonstrated by the success of a Colorado-based company, Sparkfun, which operates in one of the most ruthlessly cut-throat of all areas of business – electronics. Back in 2003 its founder, Nathan Seidle, was an undergraduate engineering student, who was finding it frustratingly difficult to locate electronic components that he needed for his projects. Today, Sparkfun designs and manufactures specialist printed circuit boards, using sophisticated pick-and-place robot machines to assemble them. Its website makes a major feature of its blog, with chatty tutorials and videos from employees, and forums that are full of customers helping one another.

Its employees are young, passionate and appear to totally love their jobs. Dogs and hobbies are indulged at work (though not on the production floor); tattoos and indie punk rock reflect its culture. It's a far cry from the "dark satanic mill" vision of manufacturing – much closer in fact to the maverick image of software companies in their startup days.

And it works. Today Sparkfun has more than 120 employees and annual revenues of around $30 million. It's growing by 50% a year. A basketball-court-sized ground floor is dominated by robotic electronic production lines, running day and night. Daily blog posts and tutorials have turned its retail website into a high-traffic community, with more than 50,000 visitors a day.

The Maker movement has a long way to go before it can really be said to have come of age. But that doesn't mean it should be ignored or regarded solely as a hobbyist's or niche manufacturer's paradise. It represents the first steps in a different way of doing business. Rather than top-down innovation by some of the biggest companies in the world, we're starting to see bottom-up innovation by countless individuals, including amateurs, entrepreneurs and professionals. We've already seen it work before, in bits, from the original PC hobbyists to the web's citizen army. Now the conditions have arrived for it to work again, at even greater, broader scale, in atoms. If the Second Industrial Revolution was the Information Age, then I would argue that a Third Industrial Age is on its way: the age of the Makers.

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson is published by Random House Business Books, priced £20. Anderson will be speaking for Intelligence Squared at 7pm on Wednesday 19 September at the Royal Institution. www.intelligencesquared.com.